The next stretch of corridor looked like someone had tried to strangle the ship and almost managed it.

  Panels hung half-open, guts exposed. Cabling drooped from the overhead in bundles, swaying slightly with the vibration of distant impacts. A light strip on the left wall had shattered. Shards glittered in the dim yellow from its neighbors, scattered across the deck like someone had spilled crystal.

  Kaden picked his way through it at a careful trot, Vos close behind.

  The blood on their armor had started to dry around the edges. Where it met fresh sweat and condensation, it smeared instead, turning to dark streaks. Every time Kaden shifted his grip on the SMG, his gauntlet left a red print on the weapon housing.

  The ship groaned again. This time the sound came with a subtle ripple under his boots, a low-frequency shudder that ran up through his legs and into his ribs. Somewhere, something big had taken a hit.

  “Valiant still talking,” Vos muttered. “That’s something.”

  It was. The background thump of friendly guns was still there, along with the sharper, angrier note of Opp return fire. Through all of it, Aurora’s tactical feed stayed mostly gray and vague in the corner of Kaden’s HUD. Too much interference, too much ECM, too many hardened sections between them and Valiant’s clean data.

  What did come through was simple.

  [TASK FORCE HARROW – ENGAGEMENT: ONGOING]

  [PRIMARY OBJECTIVE – OPP PLASMA TORPEDO CAPABILITY: DEGRADED / ACTIVE]

  He dismissed it and focused on the way ahead.

  The corridor bent into a dogleg, then another. Opp architecture didn’t love straight lines when it came to internal routes. Kaden had worked that much out between sims and briefing slides. It made sense. Harder to get a clear kill lane. Harder to fire long.

  Harder to see what waited around each turn.

  He held up a hand and slowed as they approached the next corner, shoulder brushing flaking paint. The OPP didn’t have the Hegemony’s obsession with crisp markings. Their interior colors were more utilitarian, all dingy metal punctuated with dark glyphs and subtle bands of color that Kaden’s HUD sometimes tagged as “power conduit zone” or “life support feed.”

  This stretch had nothing like that. Just bare plating and a few scratched symbols he didn’t have time to parse.

  He leaned toward the bend, keeping most of his body back, and tilted his helmet enough to see.

  Clear. For the next ten meters, anyway.

  He moved.

  They passed a blown hatch on the right where something heavy had gone wrong. The door had buckled inward. A smear of soot ringed the frame, black and greasy, like the ship had been smoking from the wound. Inside, Kaden caught a glimpse of what might once have been a rest alcove or a small control node. Now it was a charred box with melted fittings and a thin haze of smoke hanging in the air.

  On the deck outside the hatch, a single Opp helmet lay on its side. It was cracked through the top, visor spiderwebbed. There was no body in sight.

  Kaden didn’t stop to investigate.

  His left hand pulsed in time with his steps. The foam and tourniquet were holding, but every jostle sent a dull throb up his forearm. The painkillers from Field Stabilize had smoothed some of the sharpness away, but they had not erased it.

  [HAND TRAUMA – STABLE]

  [PAIN LEVEL – MODERATE]

  Aurora kept insisting. He clicked acknowledgement without breaking stride.

  “Gunfire’s louder,” Vos said quietly.

  He heard it too. The rattling bursts bled through the hull with more clarity now. Not constant, but frequent. Short runs of automatic fire, a pause, another run. The pause sometimes ended with a sound that Kaden had already learned to recognize on this ship, even muffled: the heavy thump of Opp weapons with more punch behind them.

  “Jax?” he asked.

  “Could be any Theta squad,” Vos said. “But yeah. Feels like our kind of mess.”

  The next junction they came to had more color to it. A faint strip of green ran along the right-hand wall at ankle height, broken by a few glyph plaques. Aurora marked them as “aux power distribution,” “maintenance,” and “warning,” without more detail.

  The gunfire was toward the right.

  Kaden pointed. Vos nodded.

  They moved.

  The corridor narrowed again, if that was even possible. A thick conduit trunk had been rerouted along the left wall, bulging into their path like a vein. They had to go single file. Kaden pushed the sling higher on his shoulder and tucked in closer to the right to keep his weapon clear.

  The air smelled wrong. The Valiant had scrubbers that kept everything sterile and bland. This air had an edge to it. Burnt insulation, coolant, the copper tang of blood that had gotten into filters but not all the way through.

  Kaden’s stomach tightened. His mouth tasted metallic.

  The lighting dimmed as they passed under a section where two ceiling strips had simply gone dark. Aurora compensated by bumping low-light amplification. Edges sharpened. Shadows deepened. The blood streaks on the deck, some fresh, some half-dried, stood out more clearly.

  “Looks like they’ve been pulling back through here,” Vos said.

  Kaden saw it too. Footprints in the drying patches. Smears where bodies had been dragged. A discarded Opp ammo pack, half-empty, kicked against the wall.

  “No bodies,” Kaden said.

  “Either they’re clearing their dead,” Vos said, “or they’re not dead.”

  “Comforting,” Kaden said.

  They reached the end of the constricted run and stopped again at another corner. Gunfire crackled somewhere ahead and slightly above, much clearer now. The sound had that ugly echo of a fight in confined spaces. Metal, shouting, weapons.

  Kaden signaled a hold. Vos slid up close enough that Kaden could feel the man’s breath in the comms.

  Kaden risked a quick peek.

  The corridor beyond sloped up a few degrees and opened out a little. Twenty meters ahead, it T-boned into another passage. The far walls bore thick black conduits running floor to ceiling. A dim red wash light flickered near the junction, maybe an emergency indicator.

  Between here and there, it was empty.

  “Up and then over,” Kaden murmured. “No contacts in view.”

  “Yet,” Vos said.

  They went.

  Halfway up the slope, the ship lurched.

  It wasn’t a huge movement. Nothing like the hit Valiant had taken during the evaluation sim. More like something deep in the Opp cruiser’s guts had shifted. The deck rolled beneath Kaden’s boots by a few degrees and his inner ear rebelled, already off-kilter from the earlier blast.

  He staggered one step to the side, caught himself on the conduit trunk. His left hand barked with a fresh flare of pain where the suit bumped the wall.

  Vos swore behind him. “Gravity’s hiccupping,” he said. “They’re either getting hammered or rerouting power away from something important.”

  “To torps?” Kaden asked.

  “Maybe,” Vos said. “Maybe life support. Maybe gravity. Maybe all three.”

  The floor steadied.

  They reached the T-junction and stacked up. There was more noise from the left. Kaden pointed, then leaned for a look.

  He saw a corridor that bent again after ten meters, this time toward what he guessed was the bow, judging by the slight curve and what little sense of orientation he had left. The gunfire came from beyond that bend. No contacts visible yet.

  He shifted his view to the right.

  The right-hand corridor ran only about five meters before dead-ending at a bulkhead door. Opp design, thick and multi-segmented, with a small status strip beside it. The strip showed a steady dark amber that Aurora glossed as “sealed.”

  More importantly, Kaden could feel faint vibrations through the deck plates in that direction that matched the rhythm of the gunfire.

  He pulled back.

  “Left goes toward the noise,” he said, “but it sounds closer through the door on the right.”

  Vos leaned just enough to see. “Maintenance access or bypass maybe,” he said. “Could be a shaft behind it.”

  “How closed is closed?” Kaden asked.

  Vos eyed the status strip again. “That color means it’s either locked locally or the ship’s gone to fail-safe and slammed it,” he said. “We could brute it if the frame’s damaged. Otherwise, it’s a tech job.”

  “Meaning you,” Kaden said.

  Vos snorted. “Meaning me and my last AP,” he said. “If I burn Rapid Override here, that’s it. No more smart doors. No more playing with their systems.”

  “Or we go left,” Kaden said. “Into a corridor they probably have set up to get ugly.”

  He pictured the angled turns, the lack of cover, the way the Opp seemed to love creating little kill boxes with their interior design. If Jax were here, she’d be evaluating angles, counting likely crossfire positions.

  Jax wasn’t here.

  Vos shifted his weight. Kaden could feel the decision hanging between them like static.

  “Listen,” Vos said.

  Kaden did.

  The gunfire came again. This time it was close enough that he could separate layers. He heard the hard, staccato rattle of human rifles and SMGs. The deeper thud of Tanaka’s shotgun or another heavy’s equivalent. The sharper, higher note of Opp weapons. The echo pattern was weird, bouncing through multiple chambers.

  Underneath all of it was a faint difference in tone depending on which way he angled his head. Left felt longer. Right felt closer. More direct.

  Vos nodded once, as if confirming his own internal map.

  “If we go left,” he said, “we might end up looping around and coming in behind whoever’s shooting. Or we might walk into a crossfire with no way up. If we go through that door, I’d bet we’re hitting a vertical or a maintenance route that feeds right onto whatever room they’re fighting over.”

  “Which Theta?” Kaden asked, even though he knew Vos couldn’t know.

  Vos shrugged with his good shoulder. “Does it matter?” he asked. “If torps are near this, Jax is either there already or headed that way. And even if it’s Theta-1 or 2, Command didn’t send tourists.”

  Kaden stared at the sealed door.

  If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  It was a risk to burn Vos’ last AP. It was also a risk to walk into a corridor that the Opp had chosen to leave open when they were happily slamming other doors shut.

  He thought of Jax’s voice through the static again.

  Regroup. Direct order. Alive.

  He exhaled slowly. “Do it,” he said. “We’re not getting a second shot at a straight line.”

  Vos nodded. “All right,” he said. “Let’s hope this is the smartest dumb thing I do today.”

  He stepped past Kaden and up to the door interface. The status strip flickered slightly as he approached, Aurora reacting to the proximity of an authorized user, even if this wasn’t its ship.

  [VOS – SKILL: RAPID OVERRIDE (R1) // ACTIVE]

  Kaden saw the ping flash across his HUD as Vos sank his awareness into the interface.

  The tech specialist went very still for a second. His right hand hovered over the panel controls without touching them. Auroral hints danced faintly across the indicator, little ghost-symbols Kaden couldn’t read.

  From Vos’ perspective, Kaden knew, Rapid Override wasn’t some mystical hacking montage. Aurora fed him a slightly cleaner mapping of inputs to system calls. Little nudges about which sequence belonged to what. Training wheels for a brain already wired to understand how networks thought.

  Vos’ fingers moved, tapping quickly. Not random. Not even particularly fast. Just precise. A sequence here, a hold there. A forced resync on one line. A short loop of a status query that didn’t quite fit the expected pattern.

  The amber changed to a sick, uncertain yellow.

  “Door’s not locked from a simple guard panel,” Vos murmured. “It’s slaved to a local safety protocol. Probably sealed when something blew further in. I can’t trick it into thinking everything’s fine, but I can convince it it needs to open for inspection.”

  “Speak Opp to me,” Kaden said.

  Vos snorted. “I’m telling it there might be something worse wrong behind it,” he said. “So it should open for maintenance so someone can go die, I mean, fix it.”

  The status light flickered faster, then went solid greenish.

  The door hissed.

  Internal mag clamps thunked open with an audible clack. Segmented plates retracted into the walls in an oddly organic pattern, folding back on themselves like petals.

  Beyond lay a short, square chamber, maybe three meters across, lined with more of the thick conduits they’d been seeing. The far wall was dominated by another hatch, this one round and central, with a small ladderwell grid set into the deck beside it.

  A faint draft tugged at the edges of Kaden’s armor. The air ahead carried more smoke and the sharper stink of ozone. The gunfire was louder here, filtered through the curved shapes of whatever space lay above.

  Vos swayed slightly where he stood, then braced a hand on the doorframe.

  “You good?” Kaden asked.

  Vos clicked his tongue. “AP’s flat,” he said. “Feels like someone pulled the batteries out. But yeah. Conscious. In pain. Still pretty.”

  “You keep telling yourself that,” Kaden said.

  A small alert popped up for Vos on Kaden’s HUD relay.

  [VOS – AP: 0/8]

  [REGEN – DELAYED (ACTIVE COMBAT LOAD)]

  No more skills from him. Not unless Aurora granted a sudden mercy in the form of a regen spike, which it rarely did mid-fight.

  Kaden stepped past him into the small chamber and swept it with his SMG. Nothing moved. A few access panels lined the walls. No shadows that looked wrong.

  He approached the round hatch.

  This one wasn’t lit amber. The small strip beside it blinked in pale green, status text that Aurora summarized as “ready.”

  “Maintenance shaft?” he asked.

  Vos ducked in behind him and peered up. “Ladderwell,” he said. “Goes vertical. You can hear it better in here.”

  Now that they weren’t in a long corridor, the way sound carried changed. The firefight above didn’t just come as muffled rattles. He could feel discrete thumps traveling down the ladder as faint vibrations. Somebody dumped a full mag in a hurry and he could count the rounds through his boots.

  “Height?” Kaden asked.

  Vos spread his right hand, fingers parallel to the rungs, gauging the echo. “Three decks, maybe four,” he said. “Not more than that.”

  Kaden swallowed.

  He had climbed enough ladders in sims and the academy to know what a vertical approach meant. It was one thing on the Valiant, with friendly architecture and protocols. Another on a hostile ship, into an active fight, with his offhand mangled and one of his squad’s two heavies not present.

  “Top hatch status?” he asked.

  Vos checked the indicator bank by the round door. Opp design used a cluster of small lights to represent different positions. Aurora helpfully overlaid a translated tag.

  [UPPER ACCESS – UNLOCKED / SEALED BY MANUAL CONTROL]

  “It’s shut, but not sealed in software,” Vos said. “Manual catch only. Whoever’s up there wanted it closed but they didn’t take the shaft off the grid. They might not have had time.”

  “Which means no Rapid Override,” Kaden said.

  “Correct,” Vos said. “Manual all the way. Real old-fashioned ladder killing.”

  Kaden stared up at the rungs disappearing into the darkness of the shaft above, lit only by a skinny strip of emergency luminance along one side.

  “Who goes first?” Vos asked, though his tone said he already knew.

  “Guy with two working hands,” Kaden said. “I climb better than you right now. You can cover my back from the shaft if someone comes in behind.”

  Vos nodded once. No argument. “You’re point,” he said. “If the top hatch is hot, don’t pop your head up into the kill zone. Side-eye it. Use the mirror strip on your glove.”

  Kaden glanced at his ruined left hand, then at his clean right glove.

  “Right,” Vos said. “That one.”

  Kaden reached to his forearm, tapped the small fold-out strip of reflective material the armor designers had hidden there for exactly this sort of thing. It snapped into place along the outside of his wrist, a little angled plate he could use at the top to look around corners without exposing his whole head.

  He slung the SMG across his chest, barrel down, tightened the strap, and tested how it lay across his armor. With only his right hand to climb, he had to trust the sling more than he liked.

  He put his boot on the first rung.

  The ladder was metal, cold through his soles. The shaft carried more of that burned smell, undercut with the faint, sour tang of Opp atmosphere leaking in from somewhere. Gravity here felt stable again, but there was always the chance it would hiccup while he was halfway up.

  He started climbing.

  Every pull with his right arm tugged at his shoulder and ribs. His left arm hung close to his body, fingers curled instinctively inward around pain and foam. His legs did most of the work, but the ladder still felt too narrow, too vertical, too exposed.

  Vos followed a few rungs below, close enough that Kaden could feel his presence like a physical pressure beneath his boots. The shaft amplified even small sounds: the scuff of metal on metal, their breathing, the distant battle above.

  Halfway up, something heavy slammed into the bulkhead somewhere off to their left. The ladder vibrated. Dust sifted down past Kaden’s visor, drifting like ash in the thin strip of light.

  “You fall on me, I’m filing a complaint,” Vos said quietly.

  “You’ll break my fall,” Kaden said. “Consider it a team-building exercise.”

  They climbed.

  The gunfire grew louder with each rung. Kaden began to pick out individual patterns he recognized. That fast, tight rhythm that felt like controlled burst fire. Navarro, maybe. The thunderous bark that rattled his chest even through metal. Tanaka’s shotgun.

  He found his breath speeding up, not just from exertion.

  “Sounds like Theta,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Vos said. “Or someone who stole their playlist.”

  Another deck marker slid past, embossed in Opp script, Aurora silently translating the symbols at the edge of his vision. Power junction. Weapons conduit. They were very close to the systems the fleet cared about.

  A few rungs from where the shaft capped out, Kaden stopped.

  The round hatch above was closed. Its underside was a simple metal circle with a central handgrip and a manual catch. No fancy mechanisms visible, no access panel on their side. If someone had wedged something into the latch on the far side, it could be a pain.

  He pressed his helmet gently against the side rail and listened.

  Gunfire sounded almost directly on top of them now, but offset enough that it probably wasn’t coming through this hatch. That might be a small mercy. If Opp were fighting to keep this access sealed, he’d hear impacts right on top of his head.

  He kept his voice low. “We’re here,” he said. “Top hatch. I don’t hear movement right over it.”

  “Could be a side access from the shaft,” Vos said. He flicked his gaze down the ladder wells that sometimes split to different decks on ships like this. No such break was visible here. “Or they sealed it and moved deeper into the room. Or they forgot about the ladder entirely. Not exactly in the brochure when bullets start flying.”

  “What’s the plan?” Kaden asked, even though he could feel it forming.

  “You crack it a centimeter, mirror it,” Vos said. “If you see feet, you close it. We find another way. If you see a wall, we take our chances.”

  “Simple,” Kaden said.

  “Best kind,” Vos said.

  Kaden sucked in a deep breath. The air felt warm. It smelled like metal and fire.

  He braced his feet on the rung and reached up with his right hand. The hatch’s central grip was cold and a little slick under his gauntlet.

  He took a second to make sure his damaged hand wasn’t about to bump into anything dumb, then flipped the small locking catch.

  It moved with a reluctant clunk.

  He turned the grip a fraction until he felt the hatch seal break with a soft exhale of pressure. Smoke and hotter air bled into the shaft, stinging his eyes until Aurora adjusted the filters.

  He raised his wrist so the mirror strip on his forearm angled up toward the narrow gap and gently pushed.

  The hatch lifted a few centimeters. Just enough.

  He froze, muscles straining to hold it steady.

  In the mirror, a thin slice of the deck above appeared.

  He saw scorched metal floor, scattered debris, and the edge of what might be a bulkhead console or a low barrier. No boots. No immediate enemy aiming down at the hatch.

  He adjusted the angle slightly. More floor. The base of a wall. Shattered casing from some broken system.

  Gunfire rattled again, closer and off to the right. The vibrations transmitted down through the hatch handle into his hand. He still didn’t see any feet.

  “I’ve got empty deck,” he whispered. “No one sitting on the hatch.”

  “Then this is our stop,” Vos said. “Up and out, right. I’ll be on your heels.”

  Kaden’s heart thumped hard enough that he could feel it in his tongue.

  He lowered his wrist, shifted his grip on the handle, and pushed the hatch higher.

  The round door lifted with a grudging scrape. It wasn’t light, and he only had one arm doing the work. His shoulder screamed objection. His ribs joined in. His hand trauma pinged angrily as strain translated through his torso in the wrong ways.

  He got the hatch up to about waist level and shoved it to the side so it could sit against the edge of the shaft.

  He didn’t think about how easy it would be for someone topside to slam it back down on his head.

  He hauled himself up, boot on the next rung, then one more, then his elbow over the lip. His right arm burned with effort. Pain spiked along his side where the earlier hits and the blast bruises had never fully faded.

  He grunted and rolled, ending up with his chest on the deck above and his legs still half in the shaft. It was not graceful. It was effective.

  He scrambled the rest of the way out and swung his legs up, then turned immediately to cover the hatch.

  “Clear,” he hissed.

  Vos’ helmet emerged a second later. Kaden grabbed the back of his harness with his good hand and hauled as much as he could, helping drag him up. Vos grunted, teeth bared, his boots scraping on the rungs until he flopped onto the deck beside Kaden.

  For a second they lay there, shoulder to shoulder, catching their breath.

  Then a burst of fire ripped past somewhere beyond the low barrier, close enough that Kaden saw sparks leap from the far wall.

  He flinched instinctively, then forced himself to flatten, keeping his profile low.

  They were in some kind of side alcove or service niche. The main space lay beyond the waist-high barrier a meter away. The ceiling here was lower, cut through with more conduit housings. The hatch they had used sat open in the floor, its underside scuffed and stained.

  Kaden crawled on elbows to the edge of the barrier and risked a quick look over.

  What he saw made his throat go dry.

  The chamber beyond was larger than the tight corridors they’d been fighting through. Not huge, nothing like a hangar, but big enough to hold multiple firing positions and a central cluster of heavy equipment. Opp consoles, racks of odd, organic-looking machinery, and a pattern of floor conduits that screamed “weapons system” even before Aurora tagged a few as “PLASMA CONTROL SUB-ROUTING.”

  Cover in the room was messy and improvised. Some of it looked built-in. Other parts were crates, ripped panel housings, anything that could stop a bullet.

  Opp and human marines were dug in on opposite sides of the space, trading fire across a central zone of churned deck and ruined machinery. Sparks flew. Shattered ceramic from console housings littered the floor. Smoke hung in a low layer, stirred into eddies with each movement.

  On the human side, he saw armor tags floating above crouched figures.

  [THETA-3 // K. TANAKA]

  [THETA-3 // R. JAX]

  [THETA-3 // T. NAVARRO]

  Tanaka was at the front, half-kneeling behind what had once been a solid Opp console and was now a broken, waist-high block of armor and wires. His shield was in front of him, or what was left of it. The big plate was missing a corner, eaten out by something that had left the edges melted and blackened. A dozen impacts scarred the face, some deep enough that Kaden could see the core material exposed.

  Navarro was off to his right, tucked tight behind a vertical support strut, rifle up and working. Her Controlled Burst pattern was tight and vicious, snapping Opp helmets and shoulders back wherever they dared peek.

  Jax crouched further back, one knee down behind another chunk of wreckage, rifle up, helmet turning in short, sharp motions as she tracked the flow of the battle. Her presence in the room felt almost physical even from this angle. The Opp pressure kept slamming into the invisible wall of her decisions and bouncing.

  On the Opp side, he saw at least six defenders. Maybe more behind cover. They were dug in near a bank of still-glowing consoles that Aurora tagged as “WEAPONS SUB-CONTROL.” A few had angles that allowed them to rake Theta’s position if anyone tried to advance.

  Fire stitched the space between them. Shots chewed chunks out of cover. One Opp went down as Navarro caught him in the shoulder and neck. Another leaned wide and hurled something that Kaden’s brain tagged as grenade before the HUD could.

  “Down!” he snapped, even though the people who needed to hear it were below.

  Navarro saw it. So did Jax.

  Tanaka moved without hesitation.

  He shoved off his ruined cover and launched sideways, slamming his shoulder into Jax’s chest and body-checking her deeper behind the console as the grenade bounced, spun, and detonated.

  Fragments hit Tanaka’s side and shield like a handful of angry hornets. Kaden saw armor plates buckle and chip. A piece of the blast caught Tanaka’s exposed thigh where his armor jointed. Blood misted in the air, then spattered the deck.

  Tanaka didn’t go down.

  His whole body shuddered. For a second he looked like he should. Then Pain Conditioning sank its hooks into him. His armor HUD flashed some local warning Kaden couldn’t read from here, and the big man stayed up, shotgun barking once in reflexive retaliation.

  Kaden ducked back down behind the barrier, heart hammering.

  “Theta-3,” he said. “They’re right below us.”

  Vos’ visor angled toward him. Even through the smoked glass, Kaden could see his eyes sharpen.

  “You saw them?” Vos asked.

  “Jax, Tanaka, Navarro,” Kaden said. “Holding an Opp weapons room, or trying to. Six, maybe seven Opps. Tanaka just ate a grenade.”

  Vos swore softly. “He still moving?”

  “For now,” Kaden said.

  He could still hear the shotgun, irregular but present. Jax shouting something he couldn’t make out. Navarro’s rifle, steady and punishing.

  “We’ve got the balcony,” Vos said. “And no AP. And you’ve got one and a half hands.”

  “Two-thirds of a hand,” Kaden said. “But yeah.”

  He took a breath, feeling the air burn a little in his lungs. The climb and the pain had left a sheen of sweat under his armor. The gunfire out in the main chamber kept going, relentless.

  “We hit them from above,” he said. “Jax needs angles. We give her angles.”

  Vos nodded. “We pick off anyone pinning Tanaka and Navarro,” he said. “And we don’t waste shots. You miss, they know exactly where we are and we’re the softest targets in the room.”

  Kaden nodded. He swung his SMG up, checked his mag by feel. Two-thirds was sounding thinner by the minute.

  “Look on the bright side,” he muttered. “You wanted a dramatic entrance. Balcony fire support in the middle of a weapons room is pretty dramatic.”

  Vos huffed. “Yeah,” he said. “Not exactly how I pictured it, but I’ll take the applause later.”

  He thought of Jax’s face when she’d first looked at Theta-3 in the briefing bay. The weight behind her eyes. The way she’d said nobody else dies because we’re slow.

  He breathed out and let the fear compress into a tight, cold lump somewhere under his ribs.

  “On three,” he said. “We pop up together. You take left cluster. I’ll focus right and anyone pinning Tanaka.”

  “Copy,” Vos said. “Let’s go ruin someone’s day.”

  They rose as one, blood-streaked and battered, onto the lip of the balcony, Kaden’s SMG already searching for a target.